Archives for January 2012

For those of you who are still wondering what was really behind those riots that shocked the nation last summer, we now have a new explanation. It’s nothing to do with the gaping ‘social deficit’ described by David Cameron, or a “feral underclass” of state dependents, described by Kenneth Clarke, secretary of state for justice. No, it was smacking, or rather the absence of smacking that caused it all.

So says David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, where it all started. Well, at least that is what he was initially reported as saying. To be fair he makes some very important points that have been conspicuous by their absence until now. People “no longer feel sovereign in their own homes” he argues, as the state invites itself in. The Children Act of 2004 removed the right of parents to impose “reasonable chastisement” on their children, instead barring them from inflicting anything that might result in a “reddening of the skin”. For many of his constituents, he says with an eye for the racial-bias in this formulation, “this isn’t really an issue”.

The anti-smacking lobby have been out in force, chastising those who dare to suggest that a smack is just a smack. While a spokesman for the NSPCC thinks Lammy’s comments “misleading and unhelpful” and argues for a ban just to clear up any ambiguity; according to Professor Terence Stephenson of the Royal College of Paediatrics “all too often today’s smack becomes tomorrow’s punch.” Why? Because he says so. Nevertheless, the more thoughtful of Lammy’s critics at least understand what lurks behind the smacking debate. Dreda Say Mitchell, in the Guardian‘s Comment is Free, argues “it’s the shying away from adult responsibilities that’s one of the real causes of antisocial behaviour in children.”

“Corporal punishment has been bubbling under the parenting debate for a while” says Zoe Williams“and, as it bursts out, it has taken the liberal left by surprise.” As one of its number, she goes on to ask where should the line be drawn then, “Significant bruising? Hairline fractures?” Which rather misses the point. It’s not where the line is drawn so much as who draws it.

While Lammy’s comments are a welcome challenge to a prevailing orthodoxy that seeks to deny parents their autonomy vis-à-vis the state, pointing to the very different experiences of working class families subject to its interventions; there is something profoundly unsatisfactory about the terms of the debate. It’s hard to know who to despair of the most, the meddling medics and so-called liberals who presume to know better than parents how to raise their children; or the politicians and commentariat who can’t seem to get beyond such mundane matters. Yes, adult authority is in crisis and the anti-smackers could do with a well deserved slap for doing their bit to undermine it. But, in itself, whether or not parents smack their children tells us precisely nothing about the riots.

The Youth Justice Board (YJB), under recent threat of abolition, was saved like the NHS and the benefits system before it, by the politically appointed of the Lords and the self-appointed of the commentariat. But, putting that to one side, the threat has brought to the surface an ongoing conflict in youth offending circles: should they be concerned most with criminal justice or with the ‘rights’ and welfare of children?

Rod Morgan, a former chairman of the YJB, has expressed his hopes that the reprieve will embolden it in its ‘progressive’ mission. But what does this mean? Particularly now, after the riots. Is it true that the fundamental problem facing society today is a lack of concern for the ‘rights’ of children and a neglect of their welfare? We are surrounded by such concerns. And yet, while critics are right to condemn the knee-jerk incarceration of young rioters – apparently increasing the already shockingly high number of children in detention by 8% – this has less to do with hostility to children’s welfare than with an absence of adult authority.

Regardless of whether or not we are in breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – the legitimacy of which should be in question – what is of greater concern is the lashing out by a society, and its institutions, as they lose their grip on the morals and the behaviour of the young. Mark Johnson, a ‘rehabilitated offender and former drug user’ now heading up the charity User Voice, argues ‘there is no other way to access the lives and minds of the marginalised than by utilising the skills of those who have been there too’. Similarly, an advocate of ex-offenders going into schools says: ‘The corridors are intellectually bankrupt on this issue but the cells have more than enough wisdom to confront it’.

While I’m no fan of the punitive and regard myself as a progressive, is it really the case that the youth justice system and society at large have so lost faith in their ability to hold the line, that only ex-cons have any authority over young people these days? What’s progressive about that?

Why is it that those who worry most about racism today and call for greater tolerance, exhibit an intolerance to outsiders not seen since, well, the time when society really did have a problem with racism?

According to Hugh Muir at The Guardian, from female genital mutilators to the alleged hate crimes of Luis Suarez, there are some people that ‘shouldn’t progress further than the tarmac at Gatwick’. This is not to say that there are no longer racist crimes or that we don’t still have a problem with institutional racism. If by that we mean an institutionalised practice, particularly in the police force, of targeting certain sections of the community. I am not referring to the ‘canteen culture’ version of institutional racism here, invented by the Macpherson Inquiry, and subsequently used to (ironically enough) police the thoughts and speech of the rest of us.

In an instructive short film Muir interviews some of the key players in the Inquiry. According to the Lawrence’s family lawyer Imran Khan: ‘It made race mainstream’. And yet even he acknowledges that while the language has changed – as people mind their PC Ps and Qs – racism is still there, just ‘slightly more secret’. The Macphersonisation of the race issue has been disastrous, both for black people and for society as a whole. It has racialised social discourse at a time when racism itself has been in decline as a social force; and encouraged a censorious climate around an official anti-racism that only gets more hysterical.

The Inquiry brought an end to the double jeopardy rule – an important and long-standing legal safeguard against police harassment (not least of black people) – on the pretext of giving the police the opportunity of getting it right the second time around; and played an important role in the creation of hate crime laws – criminalising what people say or even think, as opposed to what they do. We’re so used to being told that it’s everywhere, and that its ‘unwittingly’ in all of us that we can’t see racism for what it is anymore. Peter Preston, a former editor of The Guardian, recalls in a recent column the Walworth, South London, of the 1970s:

The only black people you tended to see were young men in old cars having their boots stopped and searched by the white, Carter Street Old Bill.

The persistence of this old-style institutional racism is confirmed by a recent study – again, conducted by The Guardian. It finds that of those found guilty of driving offences: black people are 44% more likely to serve a custodial sentence; 38% more likely with regards public order offences or possession of a weapon, and 27% more likely to go to prison for drugs possession. As Preston says,

There were record seizures of class A drugs into the UK last year. According to the National Treatment Agency, there are 10,000 fewer addicts seeking treatment than there were two years previously. But the fact that border officials found 2,116kg of cocaine and 773kg of heroin between April and September is hardly in itself cause for celebration. On the contrary, the evident and continued – if not increasing – demand for these drugs points both to the depths of the drug problem and to the futility of its criminalisation. Reportedly, the UK spends more, proportionally, on drug prevention than any other country in Europe. The sentences for those supplying drugs are as stiff as they come.

And yet there were estimated to be around 3 million users of illicit drugs in 2009/10. The authors of a piece in the Guardian‘s Comment is Free rightly point out that the criminalisation of drugs is long and widely acknowledged to have failed, and that it is time to try a different approach. They go on to argue that we should look to The Science. But the likes of David Nutt, the government’s former drugs adviser – sacked precisely because he thought the experts were better placed to make policy decisions than our elected representatives – are tripping on the news that magic mushrooms might heighten wellbeing for depressives. They are not, it would seem, best placed to make a principled case against the use and abuse of drugs.

According to Nutt’s fellow academics at Imperial College London, test subjects described a ‘loss of connectivity’ and a state of consciousness that is ‘less constrained by inputs from the outside world’. Whatever the merits of the research and the benefits this particular drug might hold out for those suffering from clinical depression; the subjects may, inadvertently, have stumbled upon the problem with drugs, and the problem with the arguments for decriminalisation made by its more spaced-out advocates.

A disconnect from the wider world is not just an emergent property of hallucinogenic drugs; it is also an argument against their use. Similarly, those who hide behind The Science to defend the decriminalisation of drugs, also tend to exhibit a studied withdrawal from any wider political or moral debate. Which is precisely the opposite of what is required. It is only by engaging in an open public debate about the rights and wrongs of the matter that we are likely to get beyond a policy that – I think we can all agree – doesn’t work.

For that reason the fact that Richard Branson, (albeit the archetypal hippy entrepreneur) has appeared at a House of Commons home affairs committee inquiry in an effort to make the case, is a good thing. As are new sentencing guidelines recommending much greater leniency for recreational users. The guidelines also, rightly, recognise that so-called drug ‘mules’ are often impoverished middlemen rather than the sinister types we imagine. However, we are told that it is the poor women that we should feel sorry for. They have fallen victim to and been exploited by the dealers and gangs, according to the kindly judiciary.

Campaigners need better arguments than this if they are to go beyond the patronising view that those caught up in the drugs trade are helpless and pathetic; or to get beyond dopey assertions about the supposed health benefits of getting high. The seeming libertarianism of many advocates for the liberalisation of drug policy is largely illusory. I’d much rather hear a good life-affirming defence of the criminalisation of drugs, than be fed the victim-centred therapeutics cooked up on a spoon by campaigners for its decriminalisation. The sooner they put down their spliffs and re-engage with the world around them the better.

Dave Clements Limited

I am a writer and consultant with over fifteen years experience working in senior strategic, management, project and engagement roles, and advising local government, the NHS and other public sector and VCS organisations. I am available for commissions.